Oscar Wilde Part 29

... He is transferred to a new prison. Three months elapse, and he is told of his mother's death. He speaks of his deep love and veneration for her and says that he who was once a "lord of language" has now no words left in which to tell of the appalling shame which has seized upon his heart and mind. He realises the infamy with which he has covered that honoured name.

An anecdote comes into these sorrowful pages. It is an anecdote of his sad and guarded appearance among the world of men when he was brought to appear before the Court of Bankruptcy. As he walked manacled in the corridor towards the Court Room, a friend of his, who was waiting, lifted his hat and bowed. Waited, "that, before the whole crowd, whom such an action so sweet and simple hushed into silence, he might raise his hat to me, as, handcuffed and with bowed head, I pa.s.sed him by."

A page or two is occupied with the poor convict's grat.i.tude for this simple, sweet and dignified action. A marvellous eulogy is p.r.o.nounced upon it.

What prison means to a man in the upper ranks of life is set forth in words of anguish, and then, following these paragraphs, is a frank admission that Wilde had ruined himself. "I am quite ready to say so. I am trying to say so, though they may not think it at the present moment.

This pitiless indictment I bring without pity against myself."

He describes the great and brilliant position he had held in the world.

He tells of all the splendid things with which fortune had endowed him.

He admits that he allowed pleasure to dominate him and that his end came with irremediable disgrace.

He has lain in prison for nearly two years, and now he begins to describe his mental development during the long torture. Humility, he says, is what he has found, like a treasure in a field. From this newly discovered treasure he builds up a method of conduct which he will pursue when he is released from durance. He knows, indeed, that kind friends will await him on the other side of the prison door. He will not have to beg his bread, but, nevertheless, humility shall bloom like a flower in his heart.

He begins to speak of religion, and avows his atheism. "The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at." There is no help for him in religion.

He goes on to speak of reason. There is no help for him in reason.

Reason tells him that the laws under which he was convicted were wrong and unjust laws, the system under which he suffered a wrong and unjust system.

Yet, in pursuance of his determination of Humility, he resolves to make all that has happened to him into a spiritualising medium. He is going to weave his pain and agony into the warp and woof of his life with the same readiness with which he wove the time of pleasure and success into the completion of his temperament.

Then there comes a long discussion of his own position at the moment, a common prisoner in a common gaol, and of what his position will be afterwards. He tells of occasions on which he was allowed to see his friends in prison, and afterwards describes a moment of his deepest degradation, when he was jeered at in convict dress as he stood, one of a chained gang, on Clapham Junction platform. The story is utterly terrible. On the occasion of his removal from London to Reading, he says, "I had to stand on the centre platform of Clapham Junction in convict dress and handcuffed, for all the world to look at.... When people saw me they laughed. Each train as it came up swelled the audience. Nothing could exceed their amus.e.m.e.nt. That was, of course, before they knew who I was. As soon as they had been informed they laughed still more. For half-an-hour I stood there, in the grey November rain, surrounded by a jeering mob."

We find now, in our short survey of the book, the widely discussed pa.s.sages about the personality and message of Christ. These form the greater part of this strange and moving masterpiece. They will be treated of hereafter.

Finally, come antic.i.p.ations of release and plans for the future, and "De Profundis" concludes with an especially poignant and almost painfully beautiful pa.s.sage which antic.i.p.ates the kindliness of Nature to heal a bruised soul to which man has given no solace:

"But Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt; she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole."

"DE PROFUNDIS" AS A PIECE OF PROSE

There is very little of the wise and sensuous geniality of Horace in Oscar Wilde's outlook upon life. But some lines of the poet, never a great favourite with Wilde by the way, certainly have a direct application upon the style of the author of "De Profundis"--

"Saepe stilum vertas, iterum quae digna legi sint Scripturus; neque te ut miretur turba labores, Contentus paucis lectoribus."--S. I. 10, 72.

A piece of prose to Oscar Wilde was always, in a sense, like a definite musical composition in which words took the place of notes, and he carried out the poet's injunction to polish and rewrite with meticulous care.

Wilde had, in a marvellously developed degree, the sense that a piece of prose was a built-up thing proceeding piece by piece, movement by movement, sentence by sentence, and word by word towards a definite and well-understood effect. "It was the architectural conception of work which foresees the end in the beginning and never loses sight of it, and in every part is conscious of all the rest, till the last sentence does but, with undiminished vigour, unfold and justify the first."

These lines were written by Oscar Wilde's master in English prose, Walter Pater, and we shall see how entirely Wilde has adhered to such an artistic att.i.tude. Like the Greeks, he believed in an elaborate criticism of language, and the metrical movements of prose were scientifically and artistically interesting to him, as any student of harmony takes pleasure in a contrapuntal exercise. The a.n.a.logy is perfectly correct, and Wilde himself has drawn attention to it more than once in his prose writings. Counterpoint consisted, in the old days of music, when a system of sounds called points were used for notation, in two or more lines of these points; each line represented a melody which, when set against each other and sounded simultaneously, produced correct harmony.

Wilde's prose was moulded entirely upon an appreciation of these facts, and the ear must always be the critic of the excellence of his prose rather than the intelligence, in the first instance, as reached by the eye. If we read aloud pa.s.sages of "De Profundis" the full splendour of them strikes us far more poignantly than in any other way. It is true that Wilde's prose makes an appeal _ad clerum_, and it is not necessary for the connoisseur, the initiate, to apply the test of the spoken word. But those who are not actually conversant with the more technical niceties of style will do well to read Wilde's prose aloud. They will discover in it new and unsuspected beauties.

Wilde, at one period of his career, published a series of short paragraph stories which he called "Poems in Prose." With him there were many points of contact between prose and poetry. The two things could overlap and intermingle, though in his hands neither lost its own individuality in the process. There has been too much said in the past about the old principle of sharp division between poetry and prose. This was a cla.s.sical tradition and was one which well applied to the Greek and Latin languages. It was maintained, until a late era in our own English literature, by the Gibbons and Macaulays who moulded themselves upon Cicero and Livy. But during the last century the force of the old tradition weakened very much. A newer and more flexible style of writing became permissible. Coleridge, De Quincey, Swift, Lamb, to mention a few names at random, showed that, at anyrate, prose need no longer be written as a stately cataract of ordered words with due balance and ant.i.thesis, and with certain rigid movements which were thought indispensable to correct writing.

Dr Boswell said, apropos of style--"Some think Swift's the best; others prefer a fuller and grander way of writing." To whom Dr Johnson replied--"Sir, you must first define what you mean by style, before you can judge who has good taste in style and who has bad. The two cla.s.ses of persons whom you have mentioned don't differ as to good and bad. They both agree that Swift has a good neat style, but one loves a neat style, another a style of more splendour. In the like manner one loves a plain coat, another loves a laced coat; but neither will deny that each is good in its kind."

Although Johnson and his contemporaries certainly had a great sense of rhythm and harmony in prose they were the last defenders of the old axiom that poetry and prose were two entirely separate things. It was Walter Pater who, in our own times, finally demolished the old tradition, and opened the way for a writer, such as Oscar Wilde, to bring the new discovery to its fullest perfection. Walter Pater showed that it was not true that poetry differs only from prose by the presence of metrical restraint.

Wilde, understanding this, most thoroughly, resolved early in his literary career that his prose should be beautifully coloured, jewelled, ornate, and yet capable of every delicate nuance, every almost lyric echo that could be caught from the realms of poesy and welded into the many-coloured fabric.

In Wilde's "Intentions" we have an example of his most ornamented and decorated prose, so marvellously musical that it reminds us of a fugue played on a mighty organ with innumerable stops. Yet, at the same time, in this book of Essays, Oscar Wilde frequently laid himself open to the charge of precocity and over-elaboration. It is possible to obscure the grand and ma.s.sive lines of a building by an over-elaboration of detail.

Beautiful as decorated Gothic is, I have in mind the Cathedral of Cologne, there is a more ma.s.sive grandeur in the early mediaeval work than anything the later style can give.

"De Profundis" is purged of all the faults--one might almost say the faults of excellence--that the hypercritical student may sometimes find in the earlier prose of its author. Just as the man himself was purged and purified in mind by the terrible experiences of prison, so his style also became stronger and more beautiful, and what was once reminiscent of a marvellous nocturne or ballade of Chopin, or "some mad scarlet thing by Dvorak" inherent with all the beauty of just this, now acquires the harmony and strength of a great wind blowing through a forest.

The prose is still full of the old symbolism and imagery, but these two means of producing an effect are used with much more restraint of language and simplicity of words. Note, for example, how the following paragraph, especially when read aloud, proceeds from symbol to symbol with a marvellously adroit use of the dactyl and the spondae, or rather their equivalents in English prosody, until the final thought is enunciated, the voice drops, the sentence is complete. "When one has weighed the sun in the balance and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven Heavens, star by star, there still remains oneself."

Here we notice in addition, the extraordinary influence that the words of the Bible always had upon the prose of Oscar Wilde. In his lonely prison cell, where nearly the whole of his reading must have consisted of Holy Scripture, the influence was naturally greater than ever before.

No one can read "De Profundis" with its rhythmic repet.i.tions of phrase without realising this in an extraordinary degree. Take the pa.s.sage I have just quoted and the following paragraph, which, let me a.s.sure my readers, I have taken quite at random, opening a Bible and turning over but a very few leaves of the Old Testament without any regular search,--"So that they shall take no wood out of the field, neither cut down out of the forest; for they shall burn the weapons with fire: and they shall spoil those that spoiled them, and rob those that robbed them, saith the Lord G.o.d."

Yes! there can be no possible doubt that much of the inspiration of "De Profundis"--that is, the purely literary inspiration--came from the solemn harmonies and balanced phrases of the old Hebrew singers and poets.

With Job, Oscar Wilde might well have said, and his own lamentations are strangely reminiscent of the phrase, "My harp is turned to mourning and my organ into the voice of them that weep."

In "De Profundis" the special pa.s.sages of rare and melodious beauty which star the printed page at no long intervals, have been very widely commented upon and quoted. By this time they are quite familiar to all who take an interest in modern literature, and this masterpiece of it in particular. Yet, in considering the prose of "De Profundis" we must not forget to pay a due meed of praise to the great substance of the book in which an extraordinary ease and dignity of style, an absolute simplicity of effect, which conceals the most elaborate art and the most profound knowledge of the science of words, links together those more memorable, because more striking, pa.s.sages which leap out from the page and plant themselves in the mind of the appreciative reader like arrows.

"There is hardly a word in 'De Profundis' misplaced, misused, or used at all unless the fullest possible value is got from its presence in the sentence. Even now and then, when, in the midst of the grave rhetoric of his psychology, the author descends into colloquialism, the ear is not offended in the least. He knows the precise moment when the little homely word will bring back to the reader the fact that he is reading a human doc.u.ment written by a human sufferer in a prison cell.

"If, after I am free, a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit, I can be perfectly happy by myself."

Here in the midst of pa.s.sages of calculated and cadenced beauty we have a little carefully devised sentence to which, though the ordinary reader will not realise the art and cunning of its employment, it will have precisely the effect upon the brain of the ordinary reader that Oscar Wilde designed when he wrote it.

The literary man himself, accustomed to deal with words, can, and will, appreciate the art of the artist in this regard.

It is with the profoundest appreciation and admiration for the marvellous skill of presentation, the perfect power and flexibility of the prose that I leave the consideration of the purely artistic merits of the book and turn to its real value as a human doc.u.ment.

As Oscar Wilde said of himself, he was indeed a "lord of language."

"DE PROFUNDIS" AS A REVELATION OF SELF

We now come to a consideration of "De Profundis" as a revelation, or not, of the real sentiments and thoughts of the man who wrote it.

To the British temperament it is always far more important, in the judgment of a book, that the writer should be sincere in the writing than that what he wrote should be perfectly artistic.

The British public, indeed, the whole Anglo-Saxon world, has never been able to adapt itself to the French att.i.tude that, provided a thing is a flawless work of art, the sincerity of the writer has nothing whatever to do with its worth. This att.i.tude Wilde himself consistently preached in season and out of season. For example, he wrote a study of Wainwright, the poisoner, which, read from the ordinary English ethical point of view, would seem to show him a most sympathetic advocate of crime, provided only the criminal committed his crimes in an artistic manner and had also a sense of art in life.

When a friend reproached the monster Wainwright with the murder of an innocent girl, Helen Abercrombie, to whom he owed every duty of kindness and protection, he shrugged his shoulders and said--"Yes, it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles." If we are to take Oscar Wilde's essay, "Pen, Pencil and Poison," quite seriously we must believe him to be utterly indifferent to the monstrous moral character of the hero of his memoir. He speaks of him as being not merely a poet and a painter, an art critic and antiquarian, a writer of prose and a dilettante of things delightful, but also a forger of no mean nor ordinary capacities, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age.

When "De Profundis" first made its appearance and the flood of criticism began, dozens of critics pounced upon the book, admitted its marvellous literary charm and achievement, and said that its author was absolutely and utterly insincere in all he wrote about himself. _The Times_ for example, which still holds a certain pre-eminence of place, although it is the fashion of a younger generation to decry it and to pretend that it has lost all its influence, owing both to the change of public taste in journalistic requirements and certain business enterprises which have been a.s.sociated with its name, spoke out to this effect with careful and calculated sincerity.

In an article which was extremely well written and had indubitably a certain psychological insight, the leading journal condemned "De Profundis" from an ethical point of view with no uncertain voice. It said that, while it was possessed by every wish to understand the author and to sympathise with him in the hideous ruin of his brilliant career, it was impossible, except in a very few instances, to regard his posthumous book as anything but a mere literary feat.

The excellence of that was granted, but it was not allowed to be anything more than that.

It was not in this way, so said the writer in _The Times_, that souls were laid bare, this was not sorrow, but the most dextrous counterfeit of sorrow. Wilde, so the review stated, was "probably unable to cry from the depths at all." His book simply showed that there was an armour of egotism which no arrow of fate was able to pierce. Even in "De Profundis" the poseur supplemented the artist, and the truth was not in him. If the heart of a broken man showed at all in the book it must, said _The Times_, "be looked for between the lines. It was rarely in them."